When you go to a show or a
concert, especially if the musicians performing deserve respect and
admiration, your give your complete attention to the stage. If the
music does what music should do, then the audience becomes a community,
an entity bound by the sharing of common experience, distinct but never
separate from the performers. The same thing happens at a good
theatrical production, or even when you're watching a good movie at some
guy's house with friends of friends who you've never met before.
When art or comedy puts you in that kind of stasis within a social
context, you become one with the group. The only people who try to
resist this kind of bonding experience are never the shy ones; they are
rather the people who are genuinely afraid to let go of "me".

I was in a bar on Saturday
night, and all around me twenty-somethings stood holding and sipping and
passing beverages. I sat and talked with Jonas and Neal, and sipped my Guinness,
but throughout the conversation I kept glancing through the crowd at the
faces and the bodies, listening for the different kinds of words and
laughter that came out each mouth. And I saw all of the people
engaging in the same activity, but they were doing it all without
doing it together. The game keeps going because individual, self
sufficient-entities feel most comfortable interacting with other
individual, self-sufficient entities.

I like shows better than
bars. But either way, I end up going home alone.